what you want is not what you get

Default sound device in FreeBSD

I’ve an nVidia Graphics card in my FreeBSD box, and snd_hda.ko detects audio device on it as well. But the problem is, the audio interface is masked on the card, so there are no physical audio sockets on the card.

The only problem with this setup is that all of my sound applications which try to use /dev/dsp end up using pcm0, which doesn’t exist physically. The tricky thing is that, there is no /dev/dsp on filesystem, so kernel internally manages accesses to that device node. To switch to on-board audio (i.e. pcm4) as default sound device, I did sysctl hw.snd.default_unit=4, which worked: